Corruption in Brazil

Worth the wait

The supreme court makes graft riskier

A HUSBAND follows his wife and another man to a hotel room. Through the keyhole he sees the pair embrace. As they fling off their clothes his wife’s underwear catches on the doorknob, blocking his view of what happens next—and leaving his faith in her fidelity intact.

Brazilians tell this tale to describe the naivety of the cuckold who is unwilling to make obvious inferences that lead to unwelcome conclusions. It could also stand for their legal system’s traditional leniency towards politicians accused of corruption. The slightest ambiguity in overwhelming evidence lets wrongdoers walk free.

Until now: in recent weeks Brazil has been transfixed by the sight of its most senior judges on live television, sweeping aside legal manoeuvres in what has become known as the “trial of the century”. The mensalão (“big monthly stipend”) scandal erupted in 2005 when a politician claimed that the ruling Workers’ Party (PT) was buying his and other politicians’ votes in Congress. The cash was alleged to have come from fraudulent loans at state banks and padded advertising contracts arranged by state-controlled firms.

Even after the supreme court finally set a date for the trial earlier this year (holders of high office in Brazil cannot be tried for crimes in lower courts), few expected much from it. In August, after the hearing started, pollsters found that though four-fifths believed the accusations, only a tenth thought any of those on trial would end up in jail. Judging by their insouciance, the defendants thought the same. João Paulo Cunha, a PT congressman charged with embezzlement of public funds, even accepted his party’s nomination for mayor of Osasco, a suburb of São Paulo, in municipal elections on October 7th.

Such complacency was misplaced. Though the trial still has many weeks to run, Mr Cunha has already been found guilty. He may escape jail: sentences will be decided only at the end of the case. Another defendant knows he probably will not. Marcos Valério, an advertising man, has been found guilty of funnelling dirty money to the PT. His crimes attract a stiff minimum sentence.

Senior managers from the privately owned Banco Rural and the state-controlled Banco do Brasil have also been convicted of fraud and money-laundering. That sent shivers down bankers’ spines: Brazilian bosses have always assumed that without evidence linking them directly to wrongdoing, it was enough to feign ignorance.

The trial has now moved on to the politicians accused of buying and selling votes in Congress. Some are closely linked to the former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. They include José Dirceu, his chief of staff when the scandal broke, and José Genoino and Delúbio Soares, the PT’s former president and treasurer.

Already, the supreme court has changed the rules of Brazilian politics by making graft riskier, says Mario Coelho of Congresso em Foco, a watchdog in Brasília. But if it deals as harshly with powerful politicians as with the businesspeople who funnelled money their way, that will amount to a “revolution”, he adds.

Will the trial do further damage to the PT, the party of Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s president today? It is doing badly in the municipal campaign for some big cities, but largely for local reasons. The mensalão hurt the PT back in 2005, says Carlos Lopes, a political consultant. Before that, voters had regarded it as comparatively graft-free; afterwards, it lost its claim to an ethical monopoly. It has not recovered it. But no other party has seized that banner.

There are votes available for any party which can claim convincingly to have cleaned itself up, Mr Lopes thinks. By making corruption riskier, the supreme court makes it more likely that politicians will compete for that vacant space.

Correction:Banco Rural is privately owned, not state-controlled as we wrote in the original version of this article. This was corrected on September 28th 2012.